1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure pertains to a system that performs a process of aggregating, pre-qualifying and consolidating one or more sources of information regarding individuals and business entities to which the individuals are or have been affiliated, thus yielding a professional profile, and storing and maintaining the professional profile in a managed data repository that can be accessed by other systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
For purposes of the present document, the term “professional” is defined as, of, or pertaining to a business entity, or pertaining to any role or title listed by the US Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or any other recognized agency.
There are professional profile products available in the current market. However, these products generally focus more on data regarding an individual than on the nature of a relationship the individual has with a business entity, or on business entities with which the individual has professional relationships. These professional profile products rely on a number of sources, including information directly provided by individuals. However, these professional profile products do not uniquely identify an individual or a business entity by employing a robust matching process for identification of the individual, the business entity, or the relationships between the individual and a business or multiple businesses.
These professional profile products access various sources to build professional profiles, but do not include processes to qualify the data from these sources in order to derive the best quality information from each of the various sources. In some cases they employ technology that does not allow for premium data elements related to the individual, such as email addresses and direct-dial telephone numbers for example, to be appropriately validated and aggregated into professional profiles.
A technical deficiency with current professional profile products is that although they may be able to merge data about an individual in a business context, or associated with a business, from a plurality of sources, and store the merged data into a database, they may inadvertently produce more than one record for an individual person. The present invention overcomes this deficiency by a process that includes matching data from the plurality of sources to data in repository databases that provide unique identifiers for each individual and associated business, and then utilizing the unique identifiers to direct data about the individual to a single record.